Since WordPress is open source, I’ve been easily able to migrate all comments, posts and other stuff to my own machine. I had a cheap old box lying around which is serving as the web server. It has all of 384MB of memory, an AMD 750MHz processor and is running Ubuntu server.

Since I have no traffic on this blog to speak of, the machine should do just fine. Please don’t go and link any of these posts on digg, reddit, slashdot and other such places known to bring down even the heftiest of servers!

So now the new blog address is somewhat simpler and is:

http://www.gautamsworld.com/

Please excuse my nasty of habit of constantly changing themes. I’ll probably have to make one of my own as I can’t seem to find one I like!

As someone once said, “There are only two mistakes that you can make – not going all the way, and not starting.” I believe the “mistakes”, to be made, were in reference to the search for truth, but it might just as well have been about starting anything in life.

I couldn’t be more excited at the opportunity in front of me and I’ll try and share my experiences at starting something from scratch. Lets keep the conversation going!

Apparently you can drag & drop and build your own custom site and embed mashups in them. It even allows you to share your Visual Studio Express projects with others directly from within the IDE. How cool is that?!

OK OK, so its not very cool. Amongst all the social aspects they could think of (and they have a few in here already), they come up with sharing VS Express projects? Hmm… makes you wonder about what it takes to get a project funded in Microsoft.

Check out the overview video on the Popfly site (warning: requires Silverlight) and a recent video interview with the Popfly project lead.

Links

• Microsoft Popfly

Check out the TED talk by Jonathan Harris about Universe. He talks about why he created this site and what you can do with it.

It’s pretty easy to move through news, quotes, pictures and other objects in the interface. This is simultaneously a weakness and a strength of the interface. Its a great way to discover related information, but you can also quickly get lost with no easy way to go back to some reference point.

Even if it isn’t really useful to you, its still worth checking out for just the user interface!

Links

• Universe website
• TED talk by Jonathan Harris
• Processing – The technology behind the interface

Opera Mini of course runs on the Java ME platform and so supports most phones out there. Whats more, it doesn’t need a touch screen and can work with plain old buttons and a d-pad! I was trying to make that last line sound as a positive, but who am I kidding. The iPhone rules! Down with all them buttons!

Check out the Opera Mini beta for now. Its not too bad.

Links

• Opera Mini 4 beta download

A lazy gadget geek like me is an ideal online consumer, but I didn’t really have many places to shop from. But now, slowly but surely, I can start drooling over gadgets on web sites targeting the Indian market.

Review sites like Tech 2.0 and Techtree are actively reviewing all the latest stuff available in India today. Many new online shops have cropped up selling all kinds of gizmos. Some of them include – The IT Depot, gadgets.in, Cafegadgets.in and 4gmonline.

Point. Click. Drool.

Update Found another online shop called FutureBazaar and they have some really cool deals on laptops, especially the Apple Macbook!

The story of how the U.S. Patent office allowed patenting living things is quite well put in the documentary, “The Corporation“. I would highly recommend watching the entire film. You can however watch just the relevant portion on YouTube.

The other side of the story of course is that genetic research is a very expensive process and that corporations should be allowed to get back the investment they put in. This is in general I suppose true for most kinds of patents. However, how much is too much?

Even in technology, patents typically hold for around 20 years, during which a corporation can forcefully protect it’s intellectual property. However, in such a fast changing industry, 20 years seems like an awfully long time. Start-ups have an ever increasing challenge to innovate while avoiding the millions of patent “booby traps” out there.

“Too little, too much or just about right?” – everyone will have their own answers. You can probably guess mine by now.

Links

• New York Times – Patenting Life
• YouTube – The Corporation (Advancing the Front)

But, after a lot of searching, I managed to find a solution that might suit my needs. It involved not one, but two media players. One for discs and USB mass storage devices and the other for networked media. The contenders were the Philips DVP5965K DVD player, Microsoft’s XBox 360 the D-Link DSM 320 networked media player respectively.

While the Philips player and the XBox 360 can be hunted down in the market without too much trouble, the D-Link device has only just been launched in India and can be hard to find. Try contacting the D-Link branch offices if you’re interested.

Philips DVP5965K
The Philips player is pretty darn good. It plays most popular media formats out there including DivX/Xvid video, WMA/MP3 audio and JPEG files, along with the regular VCD/SVCD/DVD video formats. It accepts media on any kind of disc and even mounts USB drives from a USB port on it’s front panel. Not all kinds of USB drives are supported, but it seemed to work with most USB sticks I threw at it. The port is USB 1.1, so even though playback is smooth, forward/rewind and track changes are slow.

The player also supports HD upscaling which upscales normal video from 480p or below to 720p. A lot here depends on the source video quality so don’t expect spectacular results. However, watching JPEGs through this player on a HDTV is an entirely different matter. The quality is simply stunning. My older DVD player also had the ability to display JPEGs on the screen, but it simply does not compare to this. Expect fun filled evenings with family and friends going through tons of pictures.

Microsoft XBox 360

So that only left access to the media on my desktop through the local network. There was actually another devices in consideration before I settled on the D-Link device. That was Microsoft’s XBox 360. Besides playing games, it also acts as a Media Center Extender streaming video and audio from your desktop to the XBox and your TV screen. Sounds good except for a few details.

First, the XBox 360, costs a bomb in India. It’s 3 times the price of the D-Link DSM 320. Only consider it if you really want the XBox to cover your gaming needs. Personally, I prefer doing my gaming on the PC. Although I am considering purchasing a Nintendo Wii when it comes to India because of it’s unique game play features.

The second problem was the availability of the Wireless Accessory for the XBox 360. This is an add-on that needs to be purchased in order to connect to wireless networks and it’s not available in India currently!

D-Link DSM 320

So the D-Link DSM 320 it is then. This is a networked media player that supports 802.11b/g wireless out of the box and can play media in almost any digital format with help from software on your desktop PC on the network. Although it ships with it’s own server software, I suggest using a free alternative called TVersity. This beauty not only supports all the features of the DSM 320, but also adds a few! It transcodes video and audio automatically so that the player can support formats it wasn’t even designed. This even includes things like Flash Video! You can also set it up to stream audio and video from the internet and watch and listen from the comfort of your living room. Pretty cool.

The device does have a few negatives though. Even a 802.11g (54 Mbps) wireless isn’t really enough for high resolution video. Even though you can transcode that down in real time and watch it smoothly, the drop in quality is noticeable. Wired 100 Mbps connections are recommended if you can manage. If you do decide to go wireless with this baby, make sure it’s not too far away from your wireless router. Also slightly irritating is the fact that the player only supports WEP for secure wireless connections. I personally prefer the safer WPA2 standard.
Also, forward/rewind is quite useless for video since the streaming aspect makes it almost as fast as watching it real time! There is a “Jump to time” feature where you can jump directly to a point in the video, but that can only be used if you knew where you left it in the first place!

So finally I have the media players set up and I can access almost everything I want to watch right from my couch with my remote!

All I need now is a good sound setup. I’ll talk about a A/V receiver and speakers in the next post.

So what features should one generally look for? Well after a lot of research, here are the major ones that I came up with.

1. High contrast ratio – at least over 1000:1.
   This makes sure the picture on the LCD TV looks really bright, especially if you have plenty of external light in the room you will place this in.
2. HD resolution – 720p/1080i and above.
   The p stands for progressive scan and the i stands for interlaced scan. 720p resolution is equivalent to 1280×720 on a computer monitor which is pretty good. DVD resolution is 480p or 720×480 and our Indian standard cable signal is 480i which is an interlaced signal. To appreciate the differences in interlaced and progressive scan, I suggest you try the wikipedia article. There’s a huge debate, amongst those who know this stuff (and have nothing better to do), about whether 720p is better than 1080i and so on. You can see for yourself and decide.
3. Lots of inputs including HDMI and VGA.
   The more inputs the TV has the better. HDMI is a new digital standard to support sending high resolution video and audio on one cable. It’s backward compatible with DVI and you can get a DVI to HDMI cable without a problem in case you feel like connecting up your desktop/laptop with a DVI output. VGA covers all other machines with analog video output. Of course, you also need the standard Component and Composite video inputs, the latter being as bad as it gets in terms of video resolution but is, unfortunately, also the most popular input in India.
4. Widescreen and wide viewing angle.
   Most LCD TV’s come in a 16:9 screen ratio. Standard TV size in India has for long been 4:3. This is fine since most of the video signals and formats we are used to are in the 4:3 format including our cable TV signal and VCDs. DVDs along with newer game consoles are mostly in the 16:9 format. In the future, High-Definition TV signals will also be in a similar format.Viewing angle refers to the ability to view the TV from extreme angles from the side. This has historically been a problem with LCD screens, but it seems to be solved with the newer TVs out there., which can do upto 178 degrees on either side and vertically as well.

So with all these features and a budget in hand, I narrowed the choice down to two models. The Samsung Bordeaux – LA32R71B – 32 inch and the Sony Bravia KLV-V32A10 – 32 inch.

With a higher contrast ratio (5000:1) and a much lower price ( Rs. 20,000 or $445 cheaper in the market), I decided to go with the Samsung LCD TV.

If you’re looking for a LCD TV for yourself in India, you might want to look at these models and their larger 40 inch cousins if your budget allows it. If you have any questions for me, fire away in the comments.

Phew… finally, I have a TV. Next post covers the media players.

Links

• Samsung Bordeaux – LA32R71B

There were only a couple of problems. The first was the budget – this stuff isn’t cheap, I can tell you that much. The second was the fact that I was in India.

Now this is a really big problem. Equipment availability is an issue and it influences the budget as well since hi-quality stuff is very expensive here.

And so, I had to make a few minor adjustments to the plan.

First, the projector would have to go. In its place comes an LCD TV. The reason is that the projector costs just about the same as a LCD TV, but has a recurring cost of changing the projector’s lamp, often enough to cause it to become quite a lot more expensive over it’s lifetime. 1080p LCD panels are rare here, but you can get a 32″ 720p display without burning too big a hole in your pocket.

Streaming wireless audio was the obvious one to go next. Ready made equipment is just not available in India and it’s something one would have to put together themselves. Not really worth it in the end.

Now, high quality A/V receivers along with good speakers are pretty much the only thing readily available in India. Denon, Yamaha, Nakamichi, Jamo, Bose, JBL – you name it, it’s here. This is the most essential cog in the whole system, so I don’t really want to make too many compromises here.

The networked media player however is a different matter. My eyes lit up the first time I read about the Helios X3000, which is a fancy name for a device that has a DVD drive that plays every audio/video format you would need, while also streaming things directly from your PC, in full 1080p HD glory. It even has a USB port to mount and play media off portable media devices.

Brilliant! But not available in India. In fact nothing available here in India even comes close.

With the plan not as grand as it was before, I set out to investigate what all is available in the market. In the next part, I’ll talk about the LCD TV I finally settled on and why. Suggestions on any of the other items on the list are welcome!